I've been trying really hard to watch my carbohydrate intake. Yesterday, I was stress eating leftovers. I saw there was a small amount of bread based stuffing and thought it'd be ok to eat it. After all, it was lunch time and that's the time of the day where I am supposed to eat the most carbs out of the whole day. My range is 35 to 40 carbs per meal and 10 to 15 carbs per snack (3 snacks a day). I ate my dark meat turkey and this small bit of stuffing. Two hours later my blood sugar was way high (275 mg/dl) and I felt awful.
Pretty much everything on the table except for a small salad and the dressing that Beloved made was high in carbs. So I took only meat and the dressing that Beloved had made. I didn't have any salad because I wasn't in the mood for it. Also, it was a really small bowl of salad for 12 people. But, I was good, I had one serving of the dressing and a generous amount of meat. I think I was successful at balancing my carb load against how much protein I needed.
I did my best to ignore the rest of the food on the table despite people waxing poetic about it. I did my best to ignore the fact that there was mulled cider, regular cider, and wine to drink. I stuck with my bottle of water (which is kinda big). I'd have loved to have had a glass of wine or a glass of cider. But the wine would mess with my psychiatric medications and the cider is basically liquid sugar. There were four different kinds of pies. That was plenty of temptation right there. The only indulgence I allowed myself was a sliver of the most diabetic friendly pie of the bunch, apple crumble. It was unsatisfactory and left me fairly disappointed. Not because it was a bad pie, but because I couldn't have more.
Cue lunchtime yesterday. I told myself that I was only going to have a little bit of the stuffing. And I did, approximately the equivalent of two slices of regular bread. Like a fool, I forgot that two slices of regular bread is, on average 60 carbs. About twenty minutes later, I felt awful. And that was when I went 'oh no, I screwed up.' and checked my blood sugar. It was high. I reminded myself a more accurate reading will be in an hour and a half. I took my blood sugar then and it was still quite high. So, I started drinking a ton of water to get that sugar out of my system. It took me about 3 hours to get it down to a semi-acceptable number.
After that fiasco, I warned Beloved about the high carb load of the stuffing. He heaved a sigh. I knew exactly how he was feeling. He had been looking forward to it because he didn't have any, and now he might be forced not to have a bite of it. He got diagnosed with type 2 diabetes a few months ago. He was rather despondent for a while but then he started looking around for recipes he could adapt, hence the pumpkin pie a little while back. He has jumped into cooking with both feet and is finding a good amount of success.
It helps that he's an engineer and approaches it as one. He views the recipe as an experiment and learns from what doesn't work. I think it's a rather brilliant way to do it. Now that we're playing around with sugar substitutes, it's like we're doing chemistry or alchemy, I'm not sure which.
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